


A Trace More Wisdom

by LtTanyaBoone



Category: Pan Am
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-06
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-15 08:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/525245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtTanyaBoone/pseuds/LtTanyaBoone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There’s one rule no one ever bothers teaching Kate when she starts playing the spy game."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Trace More Wisdom

**Disclaimers:** Pan Am, the rights to the show and its characters do not belong to me. No money was made by this.  
 **Spoilers:** 1x08 Unscheduled Departure  
 **Pairing:** Kate Cameron/Niko Lonza

* * *

#### “Then there is no more left but this, that in our doom the sorrow yet to come shall be no less than the love we two have already known.” 

\- Heloise, _Abelard and Heloise’s Letters_

* * *

There’s one rule no one ever bothers teaching Kate when she starts playing the spy game, and it will prove to be her downfall. Because under that layer of sophistication and almost coldness lies a gilded heart made of porcelain.

She doesn’t want to fall for Niko Lonza. He’s just an assignment, and she almost likes the extra challenge that prying Maggie’s clutches from him proves to be. Kate didn’t join this game because she was feeling overly patriotic. She did it because she wanted to prove to herself that she would be capable of it. Someone had recommended her, someone believed that she could live in this world of smoke and mirrors and lies and manipulation, of half-truths and betrayal, and she wants to show them she has what it takes.

So she flirts with Niko, and at first she doesn’t notice how the pull he has increases with every word he utters her way, every time he smiles and the laugh lines around his eyes deepen. She ignores the fluttering of butterflies in the pit of her stomach on the flight to Monte Carlo, dismissing them as nerves, because this will be a whole new assignment and challenge.

But then the evening turns out to be a success and drunk on the adrenaline, Kate commits a fatal mistake: she kisses back when Niko leans in. She figures that she deserves some fun after so much stress, some kind of reward. In the process, she forgets that she’s not Maggie and, while far from being a virgin, she’s one of the people who only have sex with someone when there are feelings involved. So when she wakes up the next morning, still wrapped around him and Niko snoring softly into her ear, the breath catches in her throat because the harsh light of morning shows what she ignored the night before: he is much older than her and a communist politician, of all people, and there is no way this will not end in tears.

Still when he asks if she’d see him once they are back in New York, Kate doesn’t hesitate with her answer. After agreeing, she tells herself she will let this run out slowly, go out with him a few times and then tell him that it’s too complicated because of her job. Only every minute, every second she spends in his presence she feels herself falling further, falling madly in love with him until it is much too late to get out of this with her heart intact. And despite her job and the reason why she started talking to him in the first place, she doesn’t end things when she realizes just how far in she is really.

Instead she allows herself to make plans with him. Dinners and nights spent in each other’s arms, always at her apartment, never at his. She laughs at his jokes and wants to learn about his country from him, out of genuine interest, not because of an assignment. She wants to know about the place that shaped him, and when he tells her that his mind is so full of her that she follows him everywhere, the happiness almost out-weights the guilt she feels.

Richard, though, asks her to turn Niko, and after feeling bad about it for a few moments, she figures that it might not be too bad a thing. Because somehow, in her head, she has this idea of getting it all, Niko, Pan Am and her moonlighting job at the same time. For a few precious weeks, happiness is close enough for her to smell it, but before she can really sink her fingers into it, get a tight grasp on it, it slips through her fingers.

Instead of saving him, like she wanted, instead of managing to keep their relationship and to create more incentive for him to stay in the US, it turns out that this plan Richard sold her, offered her on a silver platter, really, is most likely Niko’s death sentence. And she wishes for nothing more than a second chance, a do-over. But where to start? Right at the beginning, so she never gets into this game at all? Or when she gets the assignment with Niko? What to do differently, then? Not sleep with him, not see him again afterwards, not try to make this work as desperately as she did?

The truth is, even though it leaves her heartbroken, Kate isn’t sure if she wants to change how things went. For a few months, she was the happiest person on earth it seemed to her. She had Niko, this sophisticated man who woed her in Italian which she understood and Croatian that she had no concept of, who had views that were so close to her own that it was almost scary, who charmed her in his own way and got under her skin before she even had a chance to draw up her defenses.

In the end, Niko has to leave, but at least he decides to help their side and not to sign his death sentence right away by continuing to refuse and forcing the CIA to make good on their threat to hand the recording from Kate’s apartment over to his government’s secret police.

Henry is right, Kate finds. Grief is the price they all have to pay for love. And at least Kate got her heart broken when she was young. Maybe there is time to fix it, put it back together and get a second chance at love, a love that isn’t doomed from the start.

Then again, she’s not sure if she wants that. Because even though it hurts like a knife that’s being twisted inside her every time she thinks about him, she doesn’t want to get over Niko. She doesn’t want to forget him and their moments together, she doesn’t want to replace them with those she may share with someone else in the distant future. Maybe she _is_ lucky, after all. Because there is one thing that Kate doesn’t doubt, and that’s that Niko truly loved her, and she loved him. And at least for the time being, that has to be enough to get her through the day.

_fin._


End file.
